Wealth & Money Quote by Thomas Fuller

Fuller lands a sermon in a single bodily image: the drinker isn’t merely spending too much, he’s physically engineered for leakage. That “hole under his nose” turns the face into a defective coin slot, a grotesque little machine that swallows wages before they can become rent, food, dowry, or charity. The line works because it refuses the romantic myth of drinking as pleasure or camaraderie and frames it instead as pure drainage - money converted into nothing but breath and stink.

As a 17th-century English clergyman, Fuller is writing into a world where alehouses are both social hubs and moral panic buttons, where “good order” is tied to household economy, and where vice is often discussed in the language of stewardship. The subtext is not just personal ruin but civic contagion: if a man’s earnings vanish into his mouth, his dependents and neighbors inherit the consequences. The drinker becomes a threat to the family ledger, which in Puritan-tinged moral thinking is also a spiritual ledger.

There’s a sly precision in choosing the nose rather than the mouth. The nose is public; it broadcasts. Fuller implies that alcoholism advertises itself, that the body gives away the vice even when the man won’t. It’s a moral caricature, yes, but also an economic diagnosis: addiction as an infrastructure project, a permanent channel redirecting resources from responsibility to appetite. The joke has teeth because it treats waste as destiny - and dares you to laugh while it scolds.